Interventional medicine is the collection of medical procedures in which access to the site of treatment is made through one of the patient's blood vessels, body lumens or cavities. For example, treatment of vascular defects may be performed using a catheter which enters the patient's arterial system through a puncture of an artery, and is referred to as a Percutaneous (through the skin), Transluminal (through the blood vessel) procedure. The heretofore major impediment to particle drug delivery through the vasculature has been an inability to retain a significant fraction of the particles at the site where needed, because of the dominant viscous forces acting to rapidly drag the particles downstream in vessels with blood flowing rapidly. Even with the highest magnetic gradients available and the largest practical magnetic particles the effective delivery at the point of interest has been fractions of a percent for velocities found in all vasculatures of the body butt the capillaries. Moreover, delivery of various medical substances through the tenuous vascular wall can be difficult.
Interventional medicine is the collection of medical procedures in which access to the site of treatment is made through one of the patient's blood vessels, body cavities or lumens. For example, treatment of vascular defects may be performed using a catheter which enters the patient's arterial system through a puncture of an artery, and is referred to as a Percutaneous (through the skin), Transluminal (through the blood vessel) procedure. The heretofore major impediment to particle drug delivery through the vasculature has been an inability to retain a significant fraction of the particles at the site where needed, because of the dominant viscous forces acting to rapidly drag the particles downstream in vessels with blood flowing rapidly. Even with the highest magnetic gradients available and the largest practical magnetic particles the effective delivery at the point of interest has been fractions of a percent for velocities found in all vasculatures except the capillaries of the body. Moreover, delivery of various medical substances through the tenuous vascular wall can be difficult.